My press statement hadn’t killed the story. Instead it made it more deliciously mysterious to local reporters, and just about everybody in the New Jersey political class. I suspect that some former members of my state trooper detail had spied on me and Golan when we thought we were alone. In my first weeks as governor, I’d reassigned many of Whitman’s detail and brought in a fresh group; perhaps I ruffled feathers doing this, and they felt free to speak their minds about their experiences.
But it was also the case that Golan had angered certain state police brass. He’d attended many of the homeland security meetings we held on counterterrorism, and often his contributions were abrupt and demanding. There was nothing accommodating about Golan’s approach to security, and his attitude made him no friends.
Either way, we completely lost control of the story. Soon the papers were reporting that former FBI chief Louis Freeh had volunteered to do the job gratis, but I’d chosen an untrained, mysterious foreigner instead. This was wrong. Indirectly, Freeh—a New Jersey native—had made overtures about becoming part-time chair of our Domestic Security Preparedness Task Force. Not possible, I said. By statute, this is the responsibility of the attorney general, who by definition is in constant contact with federal authorities, counterparts in other states in the region, and statewide law enforcement officials. Our task force was not a blue-ribbon panel. It was a working agency, one that was unfortunately responding to terror threats on a nearly daily basis following 9/11. This was not a job that could be handled by anybody on a part-time basis, even someone as knowledgeable as Freeh.
I want to also make this clear: Golan Cipel was not part of the task force. His role on homeland security was never on the front lines. He had no practical portfolio there. Rather, he acted as my ears at meetings I couldn’t attend and helped me formulate policy and think about security in ways no governor in the country was prepared to do at this point in time.
These were scary times, as my former attorney general reminded me recently. Being so close to New York City, we had a huge obligation. None of us had ever done anything like this before. But we acted quickly and aggressively, well ahead of most other states. Remember, the White House didn’t establish its simplistic Homeland Security Advisory System—the color-coded alerts that cranked up people’s anxiety levels—until March 2002, six months after America came under attack.
In short order, we established the first round-the-clock bioterrorism rapid-response teams in the nation, created under Health Commissioner Lacy. We trained more than a thousand local law enforcement officers to be our first responders in case of a direct attack, and we helped coordinate readiness with business leaders and parks officials to protect our 110 most essential sites. And we devised and implemented a state-of-the-art intelligence system—a model nationally—that let local police departments study surveillance data the minute it was intercepted.
Nobody kept track of the raw number of terror alerts we fielded in those first few months, ranging from allegations that Newark Airport was an imminent target to supposedly credible reports that tractor trailers filled with explosives were on the New Jersey Turnpike heading for the Lincoln Tunnel. I’ll bet we received hundreds of such reports, maybe more. There were countless nights when none of us slept, unsure where the next attack would come. But we knew we were doing everything we could think of, everything possible, to protect the people of the state.
IN THE WEEKS AFTER THE RECORD STORY, THINGS BETWEEN Golan and me never returned to normal. In April, Dina and I finally moved into Drumthwacket, creating an even larger barrier to the secret affair. Now I lived behind a remotely-powered gate in a building surrounded by state troopers and domestic staff. I was miserable. Being separated from him was destabilizing for me—besides happiness and counsel, I found a calmness in being with him, the kind of peace that can only come with honesty. We saw each other regularly during meetings at the statehouse, and sometimes stole a private moment in my office. But the public life we both desired hemmed us in and ultimately kept us apart.
At my encouragement, Golan moved from Woodbridge to Princeton to be nearby. He found a townhouse he liked in the West Windsor community but was apprehensive about taking on the expense. I inspected the property with him and offered to cosign the mortgage if he needed. Clearly I was courting discovery more actively now. The trumpets of Gomorrah would have sounded if I put my signature on that mortgage. Luckily, his application passed muster without my help.
I was glad to have him so close, but it was never like Woodbridge. In our fishbowl existence, I managed to visit him there only once. It seemed like a mistake. He hadn’t yet hung any curtains on the back of the house, whose windows looked into the woods.
“This is insane,” I told him. “The state troopers are sitting in the parking lot.”
“You see somebody out there?”
“If they get out of their car, we’re finished.”
Golan was as cautious as I was. We locked ourselves in his bedroom, fearful refugees from our own lives.
We were no longer as brazen as we’d been in the past. We even started curtailing our official interactions, to quell talk among the staff. But our affair continued, in a fashion. It was insane. We knew that reporters were increasingly curious about what appeared like a “special relationship.” The Gannett chain had sent reporters to Israel; Golan’s childhood friends were asked about his history with men and women.
“They’re trying to prove you’re a homosexual,” Jo Astrid Glading, my communications director—who happens to be gay herself—warned me.
I was sure she was wrong, that she was as paranoid about these matters as I was. But Golan couldn’t stand the pressure. His calls to me became more and more frantic. For him, I think, being known as gay would have been worse than death. The idea of people digging through his personal life paralyzed him with fear. He fought me repeatedly and aggressively about our media policy—he wanted to extinguish this chatter about his job in homeland security by speaking directly to reporters and setting the record straight. He wanted to come out of one closet in order to remain in another.
Of course, I have to admit that there’s a chance Golan wasn’t gay. I have thought about this often. Though he claimed he’d never had sex with a man before, I didn’t believe him. During our relationship, he told me about a few women he’d had sex with. I was never jealous about that, though I would have been had he told me about sex with men. Since our secret became public, he has denied having a homosexual identity. I don’t believe that. But taking his protests at face value, it’s just possible that our shared attraction did tempt him to cross the aisle, just as my love for Kari and later for Dina had carried me into heterosexual romance.
He never expressed any conflict or regret about our time together, only frustration over the obstacles between us.
One afternoon in May, after a lengthy meeting at Drumthwacket on a long-forgotten subject, Golan stayed behind in the large, rather uncomfortable library on the first floor as the other state officials left. Dina was upstairs with Jacqueline. I looped through the kitchen and dismissed the cook and building manager, returning to the library with two cups of tea. Behind the library was a more intimate study, a small room lined with historic books and oil paintings from the New Jersey museum collection. In the middle of the room was an oval-shaped desk that was said to have belonged to Woodrow Wilson, the thirty-fourth postrevolutionary governor of New Jersey.
Golan was frustrated. He felt that I was freezing him out of my inner circle, marginalizing his contributions. It had been weeks since we’d even seen each other.
“Of course, I want to be with you—selfishly,” I told him. “But my time is fully regulated now. The scheduling process is brutal. We discuss everything: is this the right meeting to have, is this an open or closed meeting, should it be ten minutes or five? We have themed weeks, Golan. Last week was transportation, next week is education. We’ll be in South Jersey all week because we need to drive the message there. The g
overnor can’t take time off. I can’t run to West Windsor. I want to be with you. I want to spend time and go over the day’s events like we used to.”
I closed the blinds. We kissed. There was a feeling of doom, as if we both knew this was the end. The thought made me crazy.
“I love you, Golan,” I said. “You make me so happy. I’ve never, you know…”
He looked so sad just then; I knew he understood.
“I could leave all this behind. I could leave it all. I could leave the governor’s office and the career in politics. I would. I would leave it all for you if you told me we’d be together forever.”
He seemed shocked. “Do you mean that?” he asked.
I did mean it. For me, Golan represented a chance to be honest and true with myself, to have an authentic life in a gay relationship. I never felt more alive and passionate and integrated and healthy than when we were together.
But looking into his eyes I could see that life ever after was not a possibility. He was not willing to walk into the sunlight with me if it meant walking out of politics. He was like me that way—desperately wanting two things that could never fit together.
“Yes,” I answered.
He didn’t reply.
Although we never said a word about it, we both knew this was the end of our affair.
I DIDN’T LIKE LIVING AT DRUMTHWACKET. THE ROOMS DOWNSTAIRS were like a museum. The enormous dining room table was constantly set for thirty; its centerpiece was a polished sterling silver soup tureen on loan from the USS New Jersey, valued at $170,000. We were supposed to wear special gloves to touch it. The enormous living room was better equipped for greeting heads of state than for reading biographies in my boxers, my traditional mode of relaxation.
Upstairs, in the private quarters, I found even less solace, given my guilt about the affair and a growing knowledge that our marriage had been wrong from the start—a contrivance on both our parts. We rarely made love at Drumthwacket. Sometimes, bumping into one another in the endless corridors up there, we didn’t even make eye contact. Bedtime was traumatic. I’d never been much of a sleeper before this, but now a four-hour sleep was a rare hibernation.
I spent most of my nights sitting in the building’s main catering kitchen, on a tall stool, eating the split pea soup or turkey chili Cathy Reilly, the chef, prepared specially for me.
I threw more parties at Drumthwacket than all my predecessors combined. It was the way I most enjoyed spending time there. Our parties were legendary. We threw flag-raising events for just about every minority community in the state, drawing thousands of people each night; we helped them coordinate food donations from their community restaurants. We celebrated the Dominican Republic, Ireland, China, India, and Poland. You should have seen the look on my neighbors’ faces in Princeton when we hoisted Ghana’s flag up the flagpole.
Some of my neighbors actually complained. One of them called Olga Nini, our gracious residence manager, in the middle of a brunch for the Pakistani community, complete with a terrific ethnic band. “Olga,” he snapped, “am I going to have to wake up every Saturday morning to this kind of noise?”
And sometimes the events produced the opposite effect of what I’d hoped. When we raised the Italian flag, I decided to invite Italy’s ambassador to America, hoping we might increase trade relations with the country. A procession of Italian Americans spoke about New Jersey’s commitment to textiles, fashion, and design, most of which involved collaborations with Italian companies. The ambassador seemed duly impressed.
Then my last guest took the dais. I’d met Yogi Berra a couple of times, and I was so pleased he’d agreed to attend the event as one of our more prominent first-generation Italian Americans. But for some reason he limited his remarks to one stinging sentence before returning to the hors d’oeuvres table and leaving my honored guests scratching their heads.
“I’m just glad my father made the boat,” he said.
ALTHOUGH GOLAN AND I CONTINUED TALKING ON THE PHONE regularly, we saw each other very few times after that. Yet reporters continued staking us out for evidence of our affair. It was crazy. Every single day, a Gannett reporter showed up at a statehouse reception to request an interview with Golan. He would sit in the lobby, hoping to catch Golan coming or going. Document requests were nearly burying our Open Public Records officer. They wanted résumés, background checks, sign-in sheets from Drumthwacket, phone records, even the 911 transcript from my broken leg.
On two separate occasions reporters asked us directly if we were romantically involved. I was thunderstruck. The first was David Twersky, the editor of New Jersey Jewish News, who was friendly with Golan. Golan denied the allegation angrily. He was nearly breathless with anxiety when he called to tell me about it.
“Don’t worry,” I said, denying my own panic. “I’m sure he was only fishing.”
But when Twersky came to talk to me about it, he seemed quite confident. “Forgive me for saying so, Governor, but it is obvious to many people that you have a relationship with Golan Cipel that is quite personal, and eventually this threatens to cost you both a great deal.”
I believe he told me this out of compassion; he never wrote about it. But I didn’t confirm his beliefs. I didn’t deny them, either, for that matter; I just let them hang in the air. Another journalist, Sandy McClure, an unctuous reporter with the Gannett chain, was not as compassionate. She sat across from me in the governor’s office asking a million questions about my administration. Then she ambushed me with this one:
“Some people say you were with Golan when you broke your leg.”
“Absolutely untrue, Sandy,” I said in disgust. “Dina was with me the whole time. She rode with me in the ambulance, for crying out loud.”
“But she could have been flown down to Cape May in the helicopter before the ambulance was called.”
Oh, my God, I thought, this has gotten completely out of hand. One misspoken sentence had turned my private affair into a Monica Lewinsky–style scandal, and everything I’d done since had fed a mushroom cloud of suspicion. Now they’ll believe anything about us. I looked at Sandy like she was insane. “All governors are subject to unsubstantiated rumors,” I told her. “You should know that by now.”
“People say you have a homosexual relationship with Golan,” she said.
I rolled my head on my shoulders. “Sandy, that’s just absurd,” I said. It wasn’t quite a lie: the notion that I would have a gay affair under these conditions was nothing if not absurd.
IN THE MOVIE IMITATION OF LIFE, A POOR AFRICAN AMERICAN woman named Annie Johnson agrees to work as a maid for a down-on-her-luck actress named Lora Meredith in exchange for food and lodging for herself and her daughter. As the years go by and the actress finds fame and fortune, their friendship and respect deepens. But despite growing up in increasing luxury, the daughter, Sarah Jane, is humiliated by her mother’s history of racial subservience. Ultimately she leaves home to pass as white, cutting off all communication with her kin. In one of the most heartbreaking representations of identity clashes, her mother tracks her down and, painfully posing as the nanny who raised her, professes her love for “Miss Sarah Jane” and promises to never trouble her again.
I was reminded of that scene in June, which is Gay Pride Month in New Jersey. The governor traditionally addresses a statewide gay festival in Asbury Park, our burgeoning gay beachside enclave. I hadn’t realized this until a few days before June 2, when I found it posted on my schedule. In light of my growing scandal, I considered canceling, but I worried that would send out another bucket of chum to the sharks.
It was a beautiful Sunday morning. Following Mass, I drove to the shore to make a brief address as Whitman and Florio had before me, trying to bolster my profile as a confident, benevolent, heterosexual-but-supportive governor. To underscore my point, I brought Jacqueline along, hoping my young daughter’s presence would deflect any suspicion. I don’t remember what I said on the stage that day. But I remember feeling both
relieved and torn that I was up there speaking and not down in the throngs—that I was passing, like Sarah Jane.
Could they tell, I wondered? Did they see through my flimsy disguise? Did they pity me for lacking the courage to be true to myself?
All summer, my phone had been ringing nonstop in my pocket. It was Golan. He called me constantly, sometimes up to ten calls a day. For the first time, he was speaking—obliquely—about our affair, which he seemed to want to rekindle.
“Where’s this going?” he would ask.
“It’s going nowhere, Golan. Please let me get off the phone. I have a state to run. What don’t you understand about that?”
I’ll be honest. I sometimes thought his desperate sadness was about losing me, about losing our love. But that was just self-flattery. I think he hated losing access to power. The further apart we grew, the more frantic were his phone calls. He called and called and called.
NOTHING FASCINATED THE PRESS AS MUCH AS GOLAN. WE couldn’t get a positive news story about any of our many initiatives. Besides solving two enormous budget gaps, I’d rolled out new contracts to bring the long-overdue E-ZPass system to the state, started programs that would eliminate the auto insurance burden, and set aside $28 million to enhance the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, developing a program for addressing the state’s record cancer rates—the disease kills 18,000 New Jerseyans each year.
The New York Times said that electing me was “like getting two governors for the price of one because his work days and schedules are so densely packed.” But nobody at the Record, the Star-Ledger, the local Gannett chain, or the all-news radio stations had a decent thing to say about me.
The Confession Page 28